Notes

Every day for the month of April, we’ll share a poem that speaks to us. To share your own favorite, email hello@theatlantic.com, and tell us a little bit about why you love it. And to read a daily poem from the Atlantic archives, go here.

“One Art” is the only poem I’ve ever lost. My high-school English teacher gave me a wallet-sized copy that I misplaced, along with the wallet, the next year. The wallet I replaced, twice; the poem I did not. Still, a year walking around with it in my pocket was enough to learn the opening lines:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

But the poem is only about the loss of commonplace items on its surface. As the poem implies, Bishop’s life was full of losses of all sizes: “my mother’s watch,” “three loved houses,” “a continent.” And though matching art to autobiography can often miss the point, here it illuminates. As she wrote “One Art,” writes Megan Marshall, Bishop stripped draft after draft of references to a pair of “blue eyes” belonging to her lover Alice Methfessel, whose rejection—along with the suicide of Bishop’s previous partner, Lota de Macendo Soares—is believed to have inspired the poem. Meanwhile, the poem’s recurring first line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” remained the same in all 17 drafts. (This all might sound a bit depressing, but Methfessel and Bishop would later get back together.)

Still, there’s much more to see here beyond coded insights into Bishop’s life (you can read our latest issue for that).

The repeating lines of the poem’s villanelle form capture the obsessive nature of rejection and loss, trying again and again to make sense of an absence through a kind of rewinding. It’s frenetic, it’s rhythmic, but it’s not all that convincing: It strikes the tone of bad and bragging advice given by someone attempting to hide their own problems. (“I lost three houses—I GOT THIS.”)

The rhymes—“master,” “faster,” “disaster”—always give me the sense of building momentum, a force gaining speed. At the same time, each line is tightly bound within the poem’s structure, creating a sense of restraint reflected in the poem’s last lines:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Bishop’s speaker tries to convince herself that loss is a level playing field: House keys and wasted time are on par with ex-lovers and lost childhood homes. All losses, she insists, are equal and bearable; the feelings of abandonment bound up in grief should roll off a person’s back as easily as a misplaced pen. The idea is clearly false, but there’s a deeply human desire that it should be true.

This is what makes “One Art” a poem worth returning to after a death, a breakup, or any one of the many losses that lack their own established art or ritual: losses of time, of opportunity, and countless others wrought by change and chance. The poem invites the question of how to respond to these events, to begin to understand them. Where, between a key and a continent, do we place a forgotten friendship? Or the loss—as Kathryn Schulz writes—of an imagined future, individual or national?

And, like most good poems, “One Art” doesn’t fake an easy answer. Instead it shows an argument building and undoing itself, as certain lines repeat throughout the poem like an intrusive thought that can fade but never fully be put away.

It’s a compelling, gutting tug-of-war beneath a veneer of sometimes overly elegant restraint, the attempt to control and calm an untamable grief, until the pain finds an escape valve in the two-word command: “Write it!” And ironically, the call to deny the weight of her loss—to write that it is “no disaster”—affirms that, survivable as the disaster may be, it is one.

Robert Frost once described his initial joy in making a poem as “the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” As a method of getting at the truth, poetry has no claims to scientific rigor—and that’s not why I read it. Rather, I think of poetry as the fact of feeling: what happens when experience transcends received forms of knowledge. Much of the pleasure I take in reading poetry is discovering, through the beauty of language, human truths that I feel but cannot utter.

Such is the case with Frost’s “Directive,” which I love for its depiction of a grief so enormous and incomprehensible that it can only be understood through the story the speaker tells. It’s a story of the impossibility of wholeness and the inevitability of loss—of how humans’ carefully built structures of order and meaning must give way to the indifferent natural laws of death, erosion, and decay:

The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.

First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.

The literary critic Randall Jarrell once said that “Directive” is a poem that’s “hard to understand, but easy to love.” By the poem’s end, I always emerge dazed by its immensity, lost in the landscape of a grief littered with the tender remains of the poem’s many broken things.

If there’s any such thing as an actual directive in the poem, I’d argue it’s this: to recognize that in the end we are not wholly alone, even though we are not whole. Like the children in the playhouse, we too have our own tender little things in the clarifying solace of poetry, if only we raise our broken goblets and believe:

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)

Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

The dome of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, EnglandAlessia Pierdomenico / Reuters

John Donne begins the fourteenth of his Holy Sonnets with a demand that surprised me with its intensity:

Batter my heart, three person’d God, for you
As yet but knock breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Donne himself was a man of apparently conflicting pursuits and passions: He not only wrote many love poems, but also delivered some of the most influential sermons ever penned in English. In Sonnet 14, his speaker, addressing the Trinity, seems to wrestle with an angel and argue with a partner at once, wrangling abstraction and spirituality in visceral, bodily terms.

The poem’s formal excellence lies not in appearing effortless, but in actualizing immense effort, doubt, and strain. Fine, hairline cracks appear in the sonnet’s form—the occasional extra syllable, for example—as it drags readers inexorably from line to line, and from one phrase of its unusual argument to the next. The poem, like the poet, generously accommodates tension, paradox, and even outright contradiction to achieve a final unity.

It’s a piece worth keeping posted on your wall as a reminder to continue pushing and being pulled by whichever gods batter your heart.

There are endless poems about the beginning and end of love. Poems celebrating loves that have somehow managed to endure years of familiarity, however, are somewhat thinner on the ground. That’s a pity, because we need them—both to reflect many people’s lived experience, and to give readers trying to make sense of a new love affair hope that the accompanying angst, joy, and general hysterics won’t necessarily end up sputtering out in meaninglessness somewhere down the line.

Thom Gunn’s poem “The Hug” provides a beautiful snapshot of this sort of enduring love. The poet, sleeping drunkenly after his lover’s birthday party, wakes during the night. He finds himself locked in a tight heel-to-shoulder hug with his partner, in which the intervening years of their relationship seem to disappear:

It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.

There’s a bittersweet history hiding behind this simple poem from Gunn. A British poet who in his early years was linked to the bleak, clear-eyed austerity of The Movement, he escaped in the 1950s to commune life and, ultimately, gay liberation in San Francisco. Gunn lived to reflect devastatingly on the death of many friends from AIDS, but much of his later poetry, written before the epidemic’s axe fell, contains a strain of clear contentment.

Does “The Hug” show the direction in which all our mature loves might happily progress? I certainly hope so.

Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri-American poet who passed away in 2001, wrote about a lot of things. Some of those things were specific—Hindu ceremonies, American highways, his mother—but many of them were universal: saying goodbye, the moon, friendship, God. What strikes me about Ali was how he always seemed to be writing from a distance, like he was observing something through a window or from very far away.

I like to imagine it’s because he felt caught, like I often do, between two places that were meant to be home but suggested hostility. For a child of immigrants, his poetry is cathartic. It makes me think about China—about how I can recognize its images and symbols, but don’t really know it. And about how fully I accept America as part of myself, but how it doesn’t always feel the same way about me.

Ali wrote about the violence that tore Kashmir into two separate parcels of land, as well as his lasting feeling of dislocation in American tableaus after he moved to the States at 26. Maybe that’s why he had moments like he does in “Stationery,” a short, dreamy piece about an ownerless landscape and a vague wish that it would say something back to him. And I think everyone who’s ever felt adrift, or abandoned, or lonely, can relate to these last two lines:

instead of “Mom,” she’s gonna call me “Point B.” Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.

We call my mother Pollyanna. No matter how bad the weather, the argument, the traffic, or the grade, she will fervently insist that the glass is still half full. In her eyes every door closed opens a window, every obstacle faced builds character. Her optimism is genuine, sweet, occasionally infuriating, and ever reliable.

When I left home for college, I didn’t get to bring Pollyanna with me. But I found that I could revisit her rose-colored worldview in Sarah Kay’s spoken-word poem “B.” Kay has noted that she thinks “people find poetry when they need to,” and I found “B” right when I needed a familiar voice of encouragement. I have watched her perform the piece dozens of times (as have millions of others—it serves as the introduction to her viral TED Talk of the same title). Each time she inspires in me, as many favorite artists have, an irrational certainty that unbeknownst to her, we are already close friends.

And while Kay describes herself in the poem as “pretty damn naive,” her willingness to continually acknowledge life’s hardships give her words of encouragement credibility. Both Kay’s performance and her prose feel precocious, more dynamic and mature than you might initially give them credit for. She gathers simple, well-known symbols of childhood—rain puddles and superheroes and shooting stars—to put together a motherly pep talk that rings true rather than trite:

… this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick out your tongue and taste it.

I leave “B” as I leave every phone call with my mother—reminded once again that I can find my way back to hope and back to the woman who first showed it to me.

Like most poems, “For Women Who Are ‘Difficult’ to Love” is best read aloud. There’s audio floating around online of the poet, Warsan Shire, reciting it in a near-whisper, as if she recorded it in a shared space and didn’t want the person in the next room to overhear. It works. It makes it intimate. I revisit the audio every once in awhile, and each time I get the feeling that she’s speaking to me directly, giving me advice, perhaps a warning:

you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave

In what seems like a deeply personal poem, Shire recounts a failed relationship in the second person. She tells us about the man who couldn’t love her, who compared her to endless cumbersome objects: highways, horses, anything but a woman. Her intensity frightened him and so she tried being “softer,” “less volatile,” tried to fit into the image of the woman he was searching for. That part of the poem by itself is relatable: Having someone tell you that your feelings are holding you back—from working, thinking straight, being responsible, making a good argument, being worthy of love—is one of the greatest pains of being a woman. So you tweak yourself in the most miniscule ways possible in order to seem less demanding and less passionate. You speak more quietly. You smile more. You soften your requests with words like “just” and “only.” You take up as little space as possible.

When I first heard the poem at 21 years old, I was just becoming familiar with that pain—still figuring out that a woman like me, teeming with emotion, is often not well received. When I listened to Shire speak to me through tinny plastic headphones as I sat in bed, awake in the middle of the night in the room I grew up in, a novel idea came to me: What if it isn’t me that’s failing at love? What if it’s them? I clung to the poem like gospel. It kept me from staring down an eternity of solitude, just me alone with my big feelings.

Women who love fiercely run the risk of being painted as monsters—crazy and stubborn and “too” something. Too “difficult.” This poem is a message to those women. After each excruciating heartbreak, I come back to it, using it to remind myself that perhaps, despite what I’m told, the issue isn’t me:

you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

“Confession: I did not want to live here,” begins Ada Limón in her poem “State Bird.”“Not among the goldenrod, wild onions or the dropseed, not waist high in the barrel- / aged brown corn water,” describing the land around the old tobacco weigh station in Kentucky where her speaker lives now with someone she loves. She has left other homes behind for this new place, presumably for someone else’s sake, and she’s not quite lamenting, nor is she regretful. The land she describes is rich, beautiful, and strange. She picks out the details—million-dollar racehorses, “tightly wound round hay bales,” the bedroom doors—and paints them with the affection that comes from intimacy, and some of the clarity that comes from estrangement.

I did not want to live here in D.C.—or, to be honest, anywhere I’ve lived since I left home for college—but I am young and I live on shifting ground. Since I was 17 I’ve made plans in increments no longer than a year or two, moving into a dorm then out, passing through communal houses in Cambridge where I went to school and D.C. where I came for a fellowship at CityLab. I miss the smell of piñon smoke and the mud, dust and sage surrounding my family’s home in New Mexico, and the round mountain faint and present like a moon visible in the afternoon, and even the dry air that cracks my skin. But life at this age is a balancing act and a series of choices, and I’m moving to Chicago at the end of the summer.

“The two-body problem is impossible,” nodded a friend back in Boston when I told her my boyfriend, already long-distance, had accepted a job in the Midwest. He’s from the Bronx, I’m from the West, and we both owe our mothers to come back someday. In between we have our separate ambitions and obligations. Right now, my vocation is flexible; my long path leads home but I’ll bend it for a while in a direction we can share. When the stakes are higher for me, and lower for him, he’ll do the same. We adopt what we can of each other’s hopes, and give up the ones we can spare.

Maybe it’s not the two-body problem, but the one-body problem that haunts us: every person alive has just one body, with an internal compass whose needle swings variably to point to home or companionship or duty or something else, and one limited life.

“But, love, I’ll concede this:” Limón finishes,

whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird,
the loud, obvious blur of song people point to
when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.

I could never take Charles Bukowski seriously. His books always seemed to be props for a certain type of guy I was endlessly attracted to. These guys were never into Wallace Stevens, say, or Lucille Clifton, just Bukowski. So Bukowski ended up being shorthand for pretentious guys who wanted to seem cool, and edgy, and arty.

Fast forward a few years: I’m done with those guys, living a life I hadn’t planned on—my choice, yes, but still difficult. I woke up this morning wondering how to keep going today with my responsibilities, with the to-dos, with all the work of a life that feels at this moment so constricted. I opened YouTube and “The Laughing Heart” appeared as a suggestion. I’m not sure why I clicked on it, but I did. It was the poem I needed—the poem that told me why and how to be today.

The opening lines:

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.

and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

There is something comforting in reading a poem and seeing your fears, irrationalities, questionable choices, anxieties, reflected—seeing a poet articulate what you thought was inexpressible, and in that invaluable moment feeling a little less alone.

An endless list of poems resonate with me for this reason, but there’s something about Phillips’s 3rd-5th stanzas in this particular poem, with their depiction of the speaker’s relentless return to what he knows isn’t good for him:

We dive in and, as usual,
the swimming
feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake
of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first
slackens that much more quickly, if you don’t
look back. Regret,
like pity, changes nothing really, we
say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time
swimming a bit farther

I must have read this poem a hundred times, yet these lines are still as arresting as the first time I heard Carl Phillips read them. That rising panic, our conscience, the initial fear—all our natural senses that tell us to stop, go back, to turn around for the love of God—seem to dull when we habitually ignore them. And the the infinitely relatable questions, “Why should it matter now and Why shouldn’t it” echo too loudly for comfort.

But that’s just it for me and this poem: finding comfort in discomfort, being slapped in the face with the questions and reasons I too often choose to ignore, and the unexpected sagacity in having a poem act as the friend who calls you out on your shit.

To me, this poem is a constant reminder to be more self-aware, to hold myself accountable for my choices—but in the collective “we” that points to the universality of our weaknesses, I like to think (maybe selfishly), that there’s an implied reminder to forgive ourselves woven in Philips’s lines, too.

Read and listen to the full poem here. And if you know a poem that articulates the inexpressible, tell us about it via hello@theatlantic.com.

In 1925, when The Atlantic first published “The Bear Hunt,” the editor’s preface remarked that Abraham Lincoln “neither wrote, nor attempted to write, much verse.” But what he did write ain’t half bad! There’s a reason why American poet Carl Sandburg took up Honest Abe as a muse.

But the final canto, published almost 80 years after the first two as “The Bear Hunt,” is jolly escapism—it’s most joyous when read aloud. The scene transports us to the woods, where a bear’s “short-lived fun” of preying on pigs is cut short as “man and horse, with dog and gun / For vengeance, at him fly.” We settle inside the bear’s mind for a minute as it runs through a thicket—where Lincoln even manages to drop a dog pun:

A sound of danger strikes his ear;
He gives the breeze a snuff;
Away he bounds, with little fear,
And seeks the tangled rough.

He then recruits an entire “merry corps” to fill the senses—as dogs “scent around,” horses throw riders, and “bang—bang! the rifles go!” I won’t spoil the ending, but a dispute mints this great Lincoln coinage:

But, who did this, and how to trace
What ’s true from what ’s a lie,—
Like lawyers in a murder case
They stoutly argufy.

The argument doesn’t end with a verdict, but you’ll have to read the full story to find out who wins “The Bear Hunt.”

I started and finished Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene on my bus ride to work: 45 minutes flat. When I got off, I felt a little woozy—and not because I was reading on a moving vehicle.

Schizophrene is a smattering of impressions, in no particular order, from the journey of a migrant. The writing is part fiction, part poetry, part performance art, and, perhaps, part memoir—Kapil is a British-Indian writer who lives in Colorado, and her verses in Schizophrene flit back and forth between her worlds: India at the time of partition, Britain, and the “dark brown fields” of Northern Colorado. The images she creates are violently in flux, and heavy with the trauma of constantly leaving and arriving, but never belonging. This passage, towards the beginning, gave me goosebumps:

The ship docked, and I found my home in the grid system: the damp wooden stool in the bath, a slice of bread with the cheese on it, and so on. All my life, I’ve been trying to adhere to the surface of your city, your three grey rectangles split into four parts: a red dot, the axis rotated seventy-six degrees, and so on.

By now, I’ve adhered myself to the grids of many new cities. I grew up in New Delhi, and briefly lived in Dallas during middle school, when my parents flirted with the idea of immigrating to America and ultimately decided against it. But I came back to America for college, and now live in Washington, D.C. At this point, I’ve lived in the country for 10 years, apart from a stint in London.

I am lucky in that I moved around by choice—a sanctioned choice, affirmed by the documents in my nightstand drawer. That is not a luxury awarded to all migrants. People walk through deserts to put food on the table, only to be treated like malicious invaders. Some escape unimaginable circumstances, traverse oceans toward shores that have advertised themselves as beacons of opportunity—only to realize, once they land, that they’re not wanted there. If they’re told to leave, they must withstand the violence of repeated departure. If they’re allowed to stay, they must offer up their former identities in gratitude.

Those of us who can afford to “stand in line” are also at the mercy of an elusive velvet rope. And if we get in, we’ll be asked, time and again, to choose between who we are here and who we were before: Where are you really from? The answer is not easy. As immigrants, we’re neither here nor there, and in both places at once—like ghosts walking in and out of crowded rooms.

Later on in the book, Kapil writes:

Later that night it rained, washing the country away. A country both dead and living that was not, nor ever would be, my true home.

Does she mean the country she left behind or the one she lives in? Likely, it’s both.

In her 13-section poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” Adrienne Rich portrays an America of devastation and longing. The first 12 sections chart the geography of American history, traversing the country from California to Vermont, as well as a geography of human empowerment, from “some for whom peace is a white man’s word and a white man’s privilege” to:

some who have learned to handle and contemplate the shapes of
powerlessness and power
as the nurse learns hip and thigh and weight of the body he has
to lift and sponge, day upon day …

Published in 1991, “An Atlas of the Difficult World” is anchored in grievance and anger over the loss of life in the Gulf War. But Rich’s treatment of division and helplessness is timeless. She repeats, “I know you are reading this poem …” 12 times, as though to represent the 12 sections of the poem that come before this one. She speaks to different individuals—a mother, a child, an immigrant—and, by directly summoning them as readers, acknowledges their struggles. “Dedications” becomes a microcosm of the larger poem itself, a cross-section of the country’s people. Rich writes:

I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear…

And she captures the way a country itself can seem like an ever-narrowing room, its barriers increasingly stifling. Rich maps the lives of those whose voices are not heard, focusing on events or moments often invisible to others. By doing so, she reconstructs the space of her poetry, using it as a vessel to honor them.

I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight …
because even the alphabet is precious.

Here, the very act of reading becomes an act of survival, an endurance of hope despite adversity. It reminds me of what Junot Díaz wrote shortly after the election—that radical hope is our best weapon, the response to the question: “What now?” The persistence of the imagined readers of this poem—who will read this poem against all odds, against all misfortunes, across language barriers—reflects radical hope. The poem ends as such:

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

The nakedness of this last image suggests complete vulnerability, yet also hints at a beginning. It doesn’t gloss over or sentimentalize the hardship, but reveals the fundamental empathy in poetry. For me, radical hope is when you find a home in words; when, stripped as you are, there is promise in what comes next.

“It’s street cred—the more sponsors you have, the more credibility you have.”

Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: a shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number six, shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s launch, and tagged OnePlus’s Instagram handle. And it looked similar to posts from the company itself announcing the launch of its new Android phone. Joshi’s post, however, wasn’t an ad. “It looked sponsored, but it’s not,” she said. Her followers are none the wiser. “They just assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t,” she said. And she wants it that way.

Lawyers for retired General Michael Flynn had every reason to celebrate. They managed to get their client—who lobbied against U.S. interests while serving as a top Donald Trump–campaign surrogate; tried to undermine the Barack Obama administration’s Russia policy while still a private citizen; and, as a sitting national-security adviser, worked to conceal it all from the Justice Department—a recommendation of no jail time from the government. But they appeared to have made a last-minute miscalculation that put Flynn’s potential lenient sentence in doubt.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, appeared to let Flynn off the hook for his crimes in exchange for his cooperation in the Russia probe and an investigation into illegal lobbying for the Turkish government that is being conducted out of the Eastern District of Virginia. Flynn is also cooperating in a third investigation, the nature of which remains unknown. Indeed, before Tuesday’s hearing, it had appeared all but certain that Flynn’s decision to assist the government early and fully would spare him jail time. But that leniency apparently wasn’t enough for Flynn’s lawyers.

When a prominent YouTuber named Lewis Hilsenteger (aka “Unbox Therapy”) was testing out this fall’s new iPhone model, the XS, he noticed something: His skin was extra smooth in the device’s front-facing selfie cam, especially compared with older iPhone models. Hilsenteger compared it to a kind of digital makeup. “I do not look like that,” he said in a video demonstrating the phenomenon. “That’s weird … I look like I’m wearing foundation.”

He’s not the only one who has noticed the effect, either, though Apple has not acknowledged that it’s doing anything different than it has before. Speaking as a longtime iPhone user and amateur photographer, I find it undeniable that Portrait mode—a marquee technology in the latest edition of the most popular phones in the world—has gotten glowed up. Over weeks of taking photos with the device, I realized that the camera had crossed a threshold between photograph and fauxtograph. I wasn’t so much “taking pictures” as the phone was synthesizing them.

A muscular public relations strategy is often a terrible litigation strategy.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Tuesday got an unpleasant lesson on the difference between politically effective arguments and legally astute ones. Backed by an array of well-wishers including President Trump, and buoyed by widespread conservative arguments that the FBI had violated his rights, Flynn walked into a federal courtroom in Washington hoping for the probationary sentence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had recommended. Instead he was threatened with jail by a furious United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who accused him of selling America out and forced him to retreat from his evasions. Flynn’s lawyers hastily agreed to delay the sentencing until March 2019 so that he might strive to cooperate further with the Special Counsel and perhaps work off the custodial sentence that Sullivan was clearly contemplating.

One of Beijing’s top goals is transforming China into a technology powerhouse, so what happens to Huawei matters beyond China’s own borders.

As Ken Hu, the “rotating” chairman at Huawei Technologies, made the case during a briefing in southern China that his company’s telecom equipment was trustworthy and above board, he did something mundane for many global executives, yet remarkable for the embattled Chinese giant: He took questions from foreign journalists.

Hu’s press conference on Tuesday was an all-too-rare attempt by Huawei’s top brass to engage with the world—and it comes at a critical moment. This month, Hu’s colleague and the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada, accused by Washington of misleading financial institutions to break U.S. sanctions on Iran. Meng’s arrest is the latest front in a multipronged standoff between Washington and Beijing, one that encompasses disputes over trade, intellectual property, naval lanes, and much else.

Not necessarily the top photos of the year, nor the most heart-wrenching or emotional images, but a collection of photographs that are just so 2018. From Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot to Fortnite tournaments, from the airplane taken for a tragic joyride at SeaTac Airport to a caravan of thousands journeying through Mexico to the United States, from Mandarin Duck to Knickers the steer, and much more. This is 2018.

A trial of seven pro-migrant activists in France exposed the growing divide between the country’s liberal immigration laws and the mainstreaming of far-right views.

GAP, FRANCE—In a wood-paneled courtroom in this small town in the French Alps, a local judge dealt a hefty setback last week to the European Union’s treasured principle of open borders, one that has underpinned the bloc. And to do it, she fell back on a law that dates back to one of the darkest periods in European history.

In sentencing two immigrants’-rights activists to jail time and handing suspended sentences to five others, Isabelle Defarge, the judge, concluded a case that has pitted volunteers from a shelter for immigrants and asylum seekers against an anti-immigration group. To do so, she relied on a provision of French immigration law—based on a 1938 decree on “the policing of foreigners”—that makes it a crime to help a foreigner enter, circulate, or reside in France illegally. In the process, the case has come to symbolize a wider tension across the continent between advocates of open borders and far-right populists pushing countries to close in on themselves.

As internet-connected devices and appliances accumulate, one academic foresees “the monetization of every move you make.”

“Imagine this,” says an advertising consultant named Barry Lowenthal. “I’m a smart toaster, and I’m collecting data on how many times the toaster is used.”

I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”

A new biography squares the decorous legal figure with the feminist gladiator.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not just having a “moment” in American feminist culture. She has rapidly become—in a time that craves heroines—the American ideal of power and authority for millions of women and girls. Beyond the movies (RBG, released in May, and On the Basis of Sex, out in December) and the biographies, not to mention the memes and T-shirts and mugs that proliferate like lace-collared mushrooms, Ginsburg at 85 is also the closest thing America has to the consummate anti–Donald Trump. Today, more than ever, women starved for models of female influence, authenticity, dignity, and voice hold up an octogenarian justice as the embodiment of hope for an empowered future.

Last winter, a recipe for salted chocolate-chunk shortbread cookies spread through my social circle like a carbohydrate epidemic. One of my friends kept seeing the cookies pop up on Instagram and, relenting to digital peer pressure, eventually made them. She brought half the batch to a dinner party, and then it was off to the races. For months, it felt as if every time I showed up to a party, someone else was pulling a Tupperware container out of a tote bag, full of what was eventually known among us as just The Cookies.

The particular look of The Cookies—chunky and squat, with a right-angled edge rolled in Demerara sugar, finished with flaky salt—made them distinctive in a way that few recipes are, which in turn made the recipe, from the chef Alison Roman’s Dining In cookbook, an easy shorthand. As each subsequent friend made and presented their cookies, they’d note how the process went. It was as if everyone I knew had taken up baking. Via the social-media response to her book, Roman noticed the same thing. “It seemed to be a lot of first-time bakers making the cookies, like it was a fun, social art project,” she says. Beyond The Cookies, people I follow on Instagram and Twitter had also started turning out pies, cakes, tarts, and breads.

“It’s street cred—the more sponsors you have, the more credibility you have.”

Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: a shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number six, shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s launch, and tagged OnePlus’s Instagram handle. And it looked similar to posts from the company itself announcing the launch of its new Android phone. Joshi’s post, however, wasn’t an ad. “It looked sponsored, but it’s not,” she said. Her followers are none the wiser. “They just assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t,” she said. And she wants it that way.

Lawyers for retired General Michael Flynn had every reason to celebrate. They managed to get their client—who lobbied against U.S. interests while serving as a top Donald Trump–campaign surrogate; tried to undermine the Barack Obama administration’s Russia policy while still a private citizen; and, as a sitting national-security adviser, worked to conceal it all from the Justice Department—a recommendation of no jail time from the government. But they appeared to have made a last-minute miscalculation that put Flynn’s potential lenient sentence in doubt.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, appeared to let Flynn off the hook for his crimes in exchange for his cooperation in the Russia probe and an investigation into illegal lobbying for the Turkish government that is being conducted out of the Eastern District of Virginia. Flynn is also cooperating in a third investigation, the nature of which remains unknown. Indeed, before Tuesday’s hearing, it had appeared all but certain that Flynn’s decision to assist the government early and fully would spare him jail time. But that leniency apparently wasn’t enough for Flynn’s lawyers.

When a prominent YouTuber named Lewis Hilsenteger (aka “Unbox Therapy”) was testing out this fall’s new iPhone model, the XS, he noticed something: His skin was extra smooth in the device’s front-facing selfie cam, especially compared with older iPhone models. Hilsenteger compared it to a kind of digital makeup. “I do not look like that,” he said in a video demonstrating the phenomenon. “That’s weird … I look like I’m wearing foundation.”

He’s not the only one who has noticed the effect, either, though Apple has not acknowledged that it’s doing anything different than it has before. Speaking as a longtime iPhone user and amateur photographer, I find it undeniable that Portrait mode—a marquee technology in the latest edition of the most popular phones in the world—has gotten glowed up. Over weeks of taking photos with the device, I realized that the camera had crossed a threshold between photograph and fauxtograph. I wasn’t so much “taking pictures” as the phone was synthesizing them.

A muscular public relations strategy is often a terrible litigation strategy.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Tuesday got an unpleasant lesson on the difference between politically effective arguments and legally astute ones. Backed by an array of well-wishers including President Trump, and buoyed by widespread conservative arguments that the FBI had violated his rights, Flynn walked into a federal courtroom in Washington hoping for the probationary sentence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had recommended. Instead he was threatened with jail by a furious United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who accused him of selling America out and forced him to retreat from his evasions. Flynn’s lawyers hastily agreed to delay the sentencing until March 2019 so that he might strive to cooperate further with the Special Counsel and perhaps work off the custodial sentence that Sullivan was clearly contemplating.

One of Beijing’s top goals is transforming China into a technology powerhouse, so what happens to Huawei matters beyond China’s own borders.

As Ken Hu, the “rotating” chairman at Huawei Technologies, made the case during a briefing in southern China that his company’s telecom equipment was trustworthy and above board, he did something mundane for many global executives, yet remarkable for the embattled Chinese giant: He took questions from foreign journalists.

Hu’s press conference on Tuesday was an all-too-rare attempt by Huawei’s top brass to engage with the world—and it comes at a critical moment. This month, Hu’s colleague and the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada, accused by Washington of misleading financial institutions to break U.S. sanctions on Iran. Meng’s arrest is the latest front in a multipronged standoff between Washington and Beijing, one that encompasses disputes over trade, intellectual property, naval lanes, and much else.

Not necessarily the top photos of the year, nor the most heart-wrenching or emotional images, but a collection of photographs that are just so 2018. From Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot to Fortnite tournaments, from the airplane taken for a tragic joyride at SeaTac Airport to a caravan of thousands journeying through Mexico to the United States, from Mandarin Duck to Knickers the steer, and much more. This is 2018.

A trial of seven pro-migrant activists in France exposed the growing divide between the country’s liberal immigration laws and the mainstreaming of far-right views.

GAP, FRANCE—In a wood-paneled courtroom in this small town in the French Alps, a local judge dealt a hefty setback last week to the European Union’s treasured principle of open borders, one that has underpinned the bloc. And to do it, she fell back on a law that dates back to one of the darkest periods in European history.

In sentencing two immigrants’-rights activists to jail time and handing suspended sentences to five others, Isabelle Defarge, the judge, concluded a case that has pitted volunteers from a shelter for immigrants and asylum seekers against an anti-immigration group. To do so, she relied on a provision of French immigration law—based on a 1938 decree on “the policing of foreigners”—that makes it a crime to help a foreigner enter, circulate, or reside in France illegally. In the process, the case has come to symbolize a wider tension across the continent between advocates of open borders and far-right populists pushing countries to close in on themselves.

As internet-connected devices and appliances accumulate, one academic foresees “the monetization of every move you make.”

“Imagine this,” says an advertising consultant named Barry Lowenthal. “I’m a smart toaster, and I’m collecting data on how many times the toaster is used.”

I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”

A new biography squares the decorous legal figure with the feminist gladiator.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not just having a “moment” in American feminist culture. She has rapidly become—in a time that craves heroines—the American ideal of power and authority for millions of women and girls. Beyond the movies (RBG, released in May, and On the Basis of Sex, out in December) and the biographies, not to mention the memes and T-shirts and mugs that proliferate like lace-collared mushrooms, Ginsburg at 85 is also the closest thing America has to the consummate anti–Donald Trump. Today, more than ever, women starved for models of female influence, authenticity, dignity, and voice hold up an octogenarian justice as the embodiment of hope for an empowered future.

Last winter, a recipe for salted chocolate-chunk shortbread cookies spread through my social circle like a carbohydrate epidemic. One of my friends kept seeing the cookies pop up on Instagram and, relenting to digital peer pressure, eventually made them. She brought half the batch to a dinner party, and then it was off to the races. For months, it felt as if every time I showed up to a party, someone else was pulling a Tupperware container out of a tote bag, full of what was eventually known among us as just The Cookies.

The particular look of The Cookies—chunky and squat, with a right-angled edge rolled in Demerara sugar, finished with flaky salt—made them distinctive in a way that few recipes are, which in turn made the recipe, from the chef Alison Roman’s Dining In cookbook, an easy shorthand. As each subsequent friend made and presented their cookies, they’d note how the process went. It was as if everyone I knew had taken up baking. Via the social-media response to her book, Roman noticed the same thing. “It seemed to be a lot of first-time bakers making the cookies, like it was a fun, social art project,” she says. Beyond The Cookies, people I follow on Instagram and Twitter had also started turning out pies, cakes, tarts, and breads.